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Sometimes, after seeing how something works, one is able to form a new global understanding of it that makes it possible to view it and describe it from a top-down perspective. This is the case with my theory of the universe.

The three laws of Aristotelian logic are as follows:

A proposition that is true is true. A proposition that is false is false.

A proposition that true is not false and a proposition that is false is not true.

Every proposition is either true or false (the law of the excluded middle).

The third law, the law of the excluded middle, has a remarkable implication. If every proposition must be either true or false, every possible proposition must be decided. This introduces the necessity of a universal choice function that maps possibility to actuality. Since this choice function must decide among such things as the existence and nature of consciousness, this choice function must have these properties. It must have preference in order to be able to choose, which is equivalent to sensation. It must experience qualia.

God is the contemporary name given to the choice function that maps possibility to actuality. Since God is equivalent to the Aristotelian laws of truth, God is a fundamental truth.

God sought to create something that is not God that “unfolds” and has free will. So he invented the “series proposition”. A series proposition is a set of propositions in which one proposition must be resolved before the conditions of the next proposition become available. He also invented a situation in which it is impossible for there to be a deterministic algorithm that resolves these propositions; hence, he created the conditions equivalent to Bell’s theorem.

This series of propositions that must be resolved by nondeterministic means results in the existence of a choice function that is essentially like God, but with much more restricted parameters. This kind of choice function is called a spirit or a soul.

Souls have the essential characteristics of God. Due to the demands that are placed on souls, such as their need to have preference, they experience qualia similar to the qualia experienced by God. The experience of preference is the definition of qualia. The experience of color, sound, warmth, etc is the manifestation of the process of choosing. These things are the “preference” that leads to a choice. A soul is literally the act of choosing between alternative propositions, and cannot exist without the need to choose.

The “unity” experienced by a soul is the result of the number of characteristics it has to resolve that must be logically consistent. The unity of the soul over space and time is the result of it having to make choices with interdependent elements both laterally and chronologically. The “scale” of a soul is equivalent to the number of interdependent choices it must choose between.

All of physics and quantum mechanics is the manifestation of this system that God set up. Quantum indeterminacy is the manifestation of the unresolved propositions and quantum decoherence is the resolution of a proposition. Quantum entanglement is the characteristic of logically interdependent choices. Choices can be interdependent both laterally and chronologically, so entanglement occurs both laterally and chronologically.

“Time” is the process of propositions being resolved in series. Each separate set of lateral propositions is equivalent to a moment in time.

Heaven is a scenario in which most choices are between things that are preferred instead of a mixture of what is preferred and not preferred.

God is leading us to heaven by limiting our choices. However, since we have to get there through a series of choices, we must, in effect, create heaven ourselves. This is why God cannot interfere. If God interfered, his “observation” would cause decoherence of the entire system and souls would cease to exist.

God set the universe up so that heaven would be attainable through a series of choices.

The configuration of our universe is the one in which the best possible heaven can ultimately be selected for.

Before I begin, I must give a slight disclaimer. I have no idea if this theory is correct. It is an idea I have been mulling over for years and am sharing because I think it is interesting and because it lends some credence to a faith-based existence.

In quantum mechanics, there is an experiment called the “double slit” experiment that splits light beams into two paths that reunite and cause a wave interference pattern. If you are not familiar with this experiment, I recommend that you read the Wikipedia entry:

It has been observed that when it is possible to know which slit a light particle passes through, the particle stops passing through both slits. Moreover, the wave pattern disappears. This is sometimes referred to as wave function collapse. For quite some time, it was believed that the conscious act of observation caused the collapse. This opinion has been updated from “conscious observation” to “measurement”, but either is sufficiently correct for the theory I am about to propose.

When one physicist on Physics Stack Exchange was asked about the notion that conscious observation causes wave function collapse, he responded, in part, as follows:

The posit that it is consciousness that causes this collapse is very hard to debunk, due to the very nature of this type of argument. However, if you consider the following example, it should be clear that this picture is far from complete; and that this argument for consciousness causing the…process is not sufficient. Consider the weather, the detailed weather patterns that occur on any planet, being dependent of chaotic processes, which [must] be sensitive to numerous individual quantum events. if the…process does not actually take place in the absence of consciousness, then no particular weather pattern could ever establish itself out of the morass of quantum-superposed alternatives. Can we really believe that the weather on these planets remain in complex-number superpositions of innumerable distinct possibilities – just some total hazy mess quite different from actual weather – until some conscious being becomes aware of it and then at that point, and only that point the superposed weather becomes actual weather? I don’t think so – do you?

The unstated implication is that if a contemporary observation were made, the collapse would occur in such a way that the weather pattern would take on a structure that represented a consistent history all the way back to the big bang. In a sense, though not an entirely accurate sense, the history for the weather pattern, indeed the entire planet, would be written retroactively.

The author apparently considers this to be a ridiculous proposition. However, what he fails to realize is that he is essentially describing a larger scale variant of the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. Again, I refer the reader to the applicable Wikipedia entry:

Why does a proposition that apparently seems reasonable to physicists when considered at the level of a cat that has about 10^26 atoms, suddenly seem implausible when applied to a planet that has perhaps 10^50 atoms? Let us assume for the moment that the proposition the author describes as seeming absurd is actually correct.

Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind makes the argument that consciousness did not appear in the world until sometime around 1000 BC:

Jaynes built a case for this hypothesis that human brains existed in a bicameral state until as recently as 3000 years ago by citing evidence from many diverse sources including historical literature. He took an interdisciplinary approach, drawing data from many different fields. Jaynes asserted that, until roughly the times written about in Homer’s Iliad, humans did not generally have the self-awareness characteristic of consciousness as most people experience it today.

However, Jaynes’ argument does not preclude the possibility that, among some peoples, consciousness may have emerged earlier or later. Possibly, consciousness was first introduced to the world, and in effect the universe, as early as 4000 BC.

Now, consider this passage from Genesis:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

The phrase “without form, and void” is an apt description of something in a state of quantum superposition. The phrase “Let there be light” sounds very much like a description of observation or measurement.

I am postulating that the story of Genesis may essentially be correct and that the formless void it describes was a universe wide state of quantum superposition that did not take the form of the known universe, with its structured history going all the way back to the big bang, until conscious beings (possibly the first conscious humans) looked at the universe at approximately 4000 BC. In effect, there was not even any chronological time until the universe was observed. The Universe was literally created 6000 years ago.

If we replace “conscious observation” with “measurement” the only thing that changes is that someone or something had to “measure” the universe at that time. The argument might be made that there was surely some process in existence at some time prior to 4000 BC that might measure the universe, but it is not at all clear what that process would be in a universe that is entirely in a state of quantum superposition. Some novel property must have been introduced into the formless void.

An observation made by modern cosmologists is that the makeup of the universe is fine-tuned to produce life. It is so precisely fine-tuned that if any of a number of universal constants were changed even slightly, life could not form. To address this, they have proposed that there may be a large number of universes and that ours may be just one variant. What I am proposing is that there were an equivalent number of universes, but in quantum superposition, and that something happened approximately 6000 years ago that caused them to coalesce into the one we see today. Possibly, the introduction of consciousness to the universe was the catalyst that caused this coalescence, or possibly some external observation or measurement caused it.

If the universe was not an accident, but was created as many believe, there would be an elegant logic to it being created in the way I have described. When filmmakers film a scene, they do not try to get it exactly right with one take. Instead, they make several takes and select the one that works. When animal breeders want to create an animal with certain characteristics, they do not try to modify them genetically. They select the animals that are the closest to what they want and breed them. A stone sculptor does not build a rock. He chips rock away. When plant groomers want a plant to have a certain shape, they do not try to get the plant to grow that way. They let it grow unconstrained and trim away the parts that do not suit them. If someone or something wanted to create a universe with certain very specific characteristics, and one that works together logically, they would undoubtedly resort to a similar approach. An idea that has become popular in geek circles is that we are actually living in a computer program running on a giant server somewhere. If a programmer with unlimited resources wanted to create a simulation like the one we are ostensibly living in, he would certainly do it in the way I have described.

There is also a compelling argument for why the universe would have come into existence in this way over all other ways. A universe in quantum superposition accounts for all the possible configurations of the universe and why they would necessarily include one that supports life, and especially conscious human life. However there still remains the question of why the universe in quantum superposition would necessarily have coalesced into the exact configuration we are familiar with and not some other configuration. The answer is that this is the earliest possible configuration that had conscious observation. In other words, it could not have coalesced into another configuration because the coalescence would not have been consistent with the only process that appears to have been available to cause the coalescence in a universe wide state of quantum superposition: conscious human observation. Naturally, this raises the “chicken or egg” issue of whether the quantum collapse caused consciousness to appear or whether the appearance of consciousness caused the quantum collapse. Most likely, this is a false dichotomy and all that was truly necessary was that they co-occur. I suspect that some rigorous historical investigation may lead to a compelling argument that consciousness, as we know it, appeared almost exactly at the specified time. Jaynes began this investigation, but I suspect there is more to the story than what he uncovered.

It may seem unnecessary for a being like God to resort to such an approach, but assuming that he did answers a troubling question. Why would God create a universe in 4000 BC that seems to trace its origins to 13.8 billion years earlier? The answer is that the “history” of our universe was created, in a sense, “retroactively” as a part of a more contemporary creation methodology. The apparent history is not a fraud. It is a necessary characteristic of a universe created in this way. It is the branches of the plant that were left when the unwanted branches were trimmed away.

An obvious problem with this theory is that quantum collapse is probabilistic. However, I suspect that this would not be a problem for God. According to Bell’s theorem, there can be no locally real variables that control quantum collapse, but even Bell observed that true omniscience could overcome this obstacle:

There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the ‘decision’ by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears. There is no need for a faster-than-light signal to tell particle A what measurement has been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A, already ‘knows’ what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.

Bell was apparently not a religious man and did not consider the obvious alternative to super-determinism.

It is important to realize that, prior to the quantum collapse of the universe, there were no “people” in the sense that we think of them. They were people “possibilities” in quantum superposition. They were not conscious. They had no souls until consciousness entered the universe in approximately 4000 BC.

Is any of this correct? God only knows. In 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, he set in motion a challenge to young earth creationists to explain how the Book of Genesis could be reconciled with his theory. Instead of suspending judgment, many Christians adopted the view that his theory must be incorrect and set about disproving it. Now, 160 years later, our understanding of science allows a synthesis of these ideas that no one at the time could have conceptualized. Instead of denying Darwin’s evolution by natural selection, faithful Christians should have proclaimed that while observation tells them one thing, faith tells them another; and that they will put off reconciling the two until they are both fully understood.

The takeaway of what I have explained here, at least as I see it, is this. If you are a person of faith, be patient with science. Sooner or later, science and your beliefs will find each other.

For many years now, I have been in the habit of holding some special object in my hands when I pray. The object is usually something simple and natural like an unusual stone. The object makes prayer “official”. When I am holding my prayer object, it is clear in my mind that I am communicating with God and that I should concentrate on that activity. This kind of device is common in many pursuits. Sometimes students wear a special hat when they are studying to make their study sessions official and remind them to concentrate.

For several years, my prayer object was a heart-shaped stone that I bought through eBay. About a year ago, when I was climbing into my bed, I found two small pebbles, a turquoise colored one and a cream colored one. They had apparently fallen out of my pocket when I went to take a nap. I could not remember when I acquired them or why, but I was fairly sure I had picked them up on our local beach. I recognized immediately that I was to use these when I prayed instead of the heart shaped stone. I never particularly cared for those two pebbles. However, since God had provided them for me, I felt that it was my duty to use them. I always held the turquoise one in my left hand and the cream colored one in my right hand.

About a month ago, when I was shopping at a local Dollar Tree, I came across a single smooth, flat, seaweed colored stone that had the word “Faith” engraved in it in gold. The stone was sitting there all alone on a shelf of other knickknacks that were for sale. There were no others like it in that section. As with the turquoise and cream colored stones, I recognized at once that God now wanted me to use this new object when I said my prayers. I eventually discovered that it was a regular item for sale at the Dollar Tree. Each one was slightly unique and some of them had other words engraved in them. However, I knew that this particular stone was the one God had set aside for me.

The stone was a gift from God. I had to pay a dollar to get it out of the store, but that was immaterial. I was not being charged a dollar by God. I was paying an insignificant fee to a business for delivering to me the gift that God had provided.

For the following month, I used the stone as my prayer object and held it whenever I said my prayers. Its smooth flat shape was ergonomic. It fit my hands perfectly. It seemed to be made for me and for that purpose. When I cupped it in my hands while I prayed, it seemed to become a part of me.

Just recently, I was experiencing some minor hardships. They were hardships grouped into a pattern that I had come to recognize was a signal from God that there was something about my behavior that needed to change. I was not sure what it was. However, five evenings ago, when I was looking at my prayer stone, I made the connection.

For quite some time, I had been contemplating finding some book that could be my book of truth. I had been looking for a book that would be my guide book for how God wanted me to live. I was seeking my “bible”. I had been contemplating buying a particular King James Bible with just the right “look” that I had found online.

I have read the Bible from cover to cover, but it never really spoke to me. Some Christians would say that this is because I do not believe, but I have reason to doubt their interpretation. I felt, for a variety of reasons, that the appearance of this particular Bible might signify the message God was willing to share with me. That notion would require some explaining that would take me too far afield. Besides, I realize now that it was incorrect.

I was also considering collecting together some writings of my own and binding them together to be my bible. I had tried this before, but it never worked very well.

Suddenly, I realized that this was all a mistake. There was no book of rules for me. My bible was a single word carved into stone: “Faith”.

This was an important realization. If a person contemplates the single word faith, everything else falls into place. God has no other words. Even “faith” is not God’s actual word. There is no human word that is equal to God’s meaning, but faith is the closest. If a person contemplates faith, that word will lead them to God. I assume there is some comparable word in other languages and traditions.

When a person contemplates faith, they do not need a rule book. They do not need guidance of any other sort. God tells a person who contemplates faith what faith means and he reminds them of that meaning whenever they lose track. God tells a person who contemplates faith what they should do and what they should believe. It is the moral code for distinguishing right from wrong. Faith instructs the follower on what God looks like and what he has prepared for them. It is the image of the future and what comes after the physical body ceases to function. Faith is the window into God’s wisdom. A person who knows faith knows God.

Faith means living without fear of losing faith. God gave me the new prayer stone to help me identify and remember his lesson. However, if I lose the physical stone, it will be because I am meant to lose it, not because I have gotten lost in my pursuit of God.

When I understood this, the problems I was having miraculously cleared up. They seemed to dematerialize retroactively. I knew this was God’s way of saying that I had learned the right lesson.

Of course, I will have other struggles in the future. Maybe they will be lessons or maybe they will just be struggles. I do not believe that God rewards “good works” or punishes “bad works” in this life. To believe such a thing would be to believe that every rich person deserves their wealth or that cancer sufferers, tortured prisoners and people burned alive in fires somehow deserve their misery. However, I am convinced that he uses our experiences to lead us to greater understanding. In any case, I am nearly certain that I have learned this one lesson.

Saurian dualism describes two fundamental objects. These objects are both spirits, albeit of vastly different scale. The definition of a spirit, as given before, is as follows:

A spirit is a choice function that exists where a choice is called for and it is impossible, even in principle, for the choice to be made by a deterministic algorithm. The magnitude of the spirit is equal to the product of the degrees of freedom of the total entangled choice to be made.

The large-scale spirit, G(x) is a choice function that decides the state of the entire universe down to the minutest detail. The small-scale spirits, P(x), act on much smaller scale sets established by G(x). Both types of spirits are made necessary by the existence of sets of propositions that would remain unresolved if not for the spirits acting to resolve them. All such propositions are inaccessible to any deterministic algorithm.

The state of the universe, which is an uncountably infinite set of propositions, cannot be resolved by a deterministic algorithm because of the scale of the set of propositions and the dynamism of their interactions. It appears that both the scale of these propositions and the dynamism of their interactions must be the largest possible cardinal number. It is important to realize that nothing “generates” G(x). The necessary qualities of the requisite choice function diverge to G(x). The law of the excluded middle dictates that there are no undecided propositions. Therefore, the universe must be completely decided. However, it seems inescapable that the universe, as a whole, must have three characteristics. The first characteristic is that it can have a number of possible configurations that are equal to the largest possible cardinal number. The second characteristic is that the complexity of these configurations can be equal to the largest possible cardinal number. The third characteristic is that the configuration of the universe can have no internal contradictions. It is impossible for a person to even begin to comprehend what this entails. Nevertheless, this is the problem that arises. G(x) is the mapping of all these possible states to just one. It is tempting to think that the universe could simply have the requisite single configuration and be done with it. The problem is that remaining in one configuration is an ongoing proposition that also has an uncountably large number of possible solutions. Nothing, absolutely nothing, just is. G(x) is not a conscious agent because that quality is essential for its task. It is a conscious agent because that quality is possible, and G(x) must have every possible quality.

The propositions that the P(x) spirits act on are inaccessible to deterministic algorithms because that is the way G(x) has established them. As I observed before, this was a surrealistically clever trick of design that challenges the limits of credulity. Yet, Bell’s theorem shows that they exist.

The sets of propositions that the P(x) act on are established as a series in which it is impossible for one proposition to be resolved until the previous proposition has been resolved. The procession from the resolution of one proposition to the next is what the P(x) perceive as the passage of time.

G(x) and P(x) are both fundamental truths of existence that are equivalent to the third law of Aristotelian logic, the law of the excluded middle. Consequently, the choices that these spirits make are also fundamental truths. Since the universe is the result of choices made either by G(x) or P(x), the universe, as a whole, is a fundamental truth. As such, it could be no other way.

The biggest obstacle to grasping this construct is our notion of time. It does not seem like a fundamental truth such as is resolved by the P(x) could exist that only becomes true with the passage of time. However, this misperception is quickly resolved when one realizes that our perception of time is actually the perception of P(x) spirits resolving sets of propositions in a particular order. There is no time independent from the ordered resolution of propositions by P(x).

In a sense, this overall construct implies that the entire universe is deterministic. Yet, relative to the P(x) that has the task of resolving certain propositions in a particular order, the universe is not deterministic at all. The P(x) are the “truth” that determines what the resolution of the propositions will be.

This overall construct resolves the question of “free will”. It is true that P(x) have free will, but their free will is the determining factor in the overall state of the universe. Another way to look at this is to ask a simple question: “What is the relationship between a fundamental truth and that which it makes true?”

This also makes it clear why humans have struggled for so long with the construct of free will. It turns out that the obstacle all along was their perception of time. When one sees actions as taking place over a period of time, it seems like free will must be something that chooses what will happen in the future. However, the perception of past, present and future are misleading. Actually, in a sense, the past present and future are all part of a single construct. It is the sequence of choices the P(x) make that is free will. Relative to the universe overall, the choices are all already made. Relative to the P(x) one choice cannot be made until the prior choice is made, and their act of choosing is free will.

I realize that my own struggle with this overall construct is with the notion of consciousness being the emanation of a spirit, as I define it, and a spirit being a fundamental truth. A fundamental truth seems like a very “big” thing. I realize that the reason why I struggle with a spirit being a fundamental truth is that this raises the character of a spirit to such a seemingly high level. Like most members of western society, I have been inundated with the notion that humans and their existence are small and unimportant. However, the notion that the human spirit is, somehow, insignificant, is really not a reasonable idea.

Science is able to formulate rules to describe nearly everything that it encounters, but it struggles with human consciousness. That struggle alone is sufficient reason to suppose that consciousness is “big”. Also, our consciousness is really the only thing we can perceive. As some writers have put it, “Consciousness does not exist in the universe; the universe exists in consciousness.” When one lets go of the meme, implanted in our brains by such prominent writers as Carl Sagan, that human consciousness is far too “little” to be a fundamental truth, everything about my theory comes into focus.

I have gotten so far away from any sort of empirical science with my ideas on Saurian Dualism that these ideas have taken on the character of what Extropia DaSilva calls “just-so stories”. Nevertheless, I feel a need to work out all the loose ends.

Although the reason is somewhat obscure, I have become obsessed with the notion that spirits must remain completely separate from the “material” universe. However the description in my last entry suggests that they must have at least some contact with the material universe in order to delete paths that they do not follow. Also there is some question as to how spirits read the material universe in order to follow paths in it.

For these reasons, I have invented two new ideas: langoliers and transcription factors.

The term langolier comes from a Stephen King short story and a subsequent mini-series. In the Stephen King story, Langoliers follow closely behind the present and eat up the past.

Stephen King’s Langoliers from Mini-Series

The langoliers in my theory follow a history path right behind a spirit and make that path disappear behind it. They also make any paths disappear that are no longer blocked by the spirit. The moment a spirit comes to a fork in a path associated with quantum field collapse, the langolier is no longer blocked from access to that path and immediately destroys it well into the indefinite future.

Langoliers are not spirits, they are not conscious, and they do not have free will. They are not material in the sense of the material universe. However, they have the property of being able to follow a physical timeline and also detect the presence of a spirit.

Transcription factors are the intermediary between the physical universe and a spirit. They transcribe the physical universe to the spirit so that the spirit can “see” what is going on without actually interacting with the physical universe. They also keep the spirit attached to and on the track of the physical universe. In this regard, they are very much like the transcription factors that read DNA and translate it into RNA.

Like langoliers, transcription factors are not spirits, they are not conscious, and they do not have free will. Nor are they physical.

Something that has been bothering me about my theories of consciousness and time is that there is a conflict between the notions that consciousness must necessarily be separate from the syntactical processing of the mechanical universe while, at the same time, it must also resolve something about that mechanical universe in order to be called into existence.

The problem goes something like this. Since the mechanical universe is syntactical and consciousness is semantic, consciousness cannot be a part of the mechanical universe. For this reason, instead of interacting with the universe, a spirit, which manifests as consciousness, merely traces out one of many paths according to the Everett interpretation of quantum field collapse. However, the whole reason why a spirit exists is that there are recurring propositions in the mechanical universe—which way the field collapses—that can only be resolved if a choice function exists to resolve them. A spirit is supposedly the choice function that resolves those propositions.

I get around the problem of a spirit interacting with the mechanical universe by having it merely trace a path in the universe and choosing a path when it comes to a split. However, if the spirit merely chooses a path, it is not deciding anything but its own course. It does not influence the universe at all. However, if the spirit does not choose anything but its own path, it is not made necessary by the need for a choice. A spirit is rendered useless if it exists only to resolve propositions that affect only itself.

For a while, I was content to assume that the Everett interpretation of quantum field collapse was only an interpretation and that, when it was convenient, I could switch back to the Copenhagen interpretation, but that kind of theoretic rationalizing is something I am trying to avoid. I am developing a theory that simply works.

What I propose as a remedy is that a spirit does not choose the path that the universe follows, but chooses which paths remain after it selects its own path. In other words, after the spirit chooses a path, the other paths that it does not choose disappear. It does not choose which path comes into existence, since all the paths exist initially. It chooses which paths go away.

This not only solves the problem of what a spirit decides. It also solves a problem with thermodynamics. A principle of thermodynamics is that entropy can only increase. However, in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the possibility that paths may converge creates the possibility that entropy will decrease. However, if every path that a spirit does not follow is “pruned” this problem goes away. Since the pruning continues through the point where the paths might have fused, the overlap no longer exists for either path.

This is the perfect solution. It means that the path the universe follows is not influenced at all by a spirit and the spirit is not influenced at all by the universe while, at the same time, it is called into existence to resolve a proposition in the universe.

It may seem at first that the fact that a spirit’s action removes the possibility of paths converging has an eventual effect on the path that the universe can follow, but actually it does not. The universe could not have followed that path anyhow due to the second law of thermodynamics. The choice that a spirit makes merely provides the mechanism by which the convergence is prevented. However, the fact that it performs that inevitable service, once again guarantees its existence.

Note that the spirit only chooses the path that the universe follows at points of quantum collapse. It has no influence on the syntactical processing that manifests as classical physics. The universe behaves exactly as it would have done if the spirit did not exist. However, at certain points where the universe would have split anyhow, and the split would have been probabilistic according to the Copenhagen interpretation, a spirit, in a sense, causes the deck to be stacked. It has no influence on the course of paths it does not follow, since those paths cease to exist. (Note that there is no observer in those paths, since the spirit has taken a different path.) There is no classical trace of the spirit having acted at all. A good analogy would be someone who always seems to get winning hands in poker games while there is no evidence, even in theory, that they have cheated.

To accommodate any “sum over histories” effects or quantum erasure effects, it is possible that the neglected path does not disappear until every possibility of it influencing the path a spirit follows has run its course.